Word of the Week - 107

Word of the Week: CONTAIN

As I look at the packet of de-stashed envelopes, bought for a song on etsy, sliding from shades of banana cream pie yellow, through sherbet hues to those of a spring garden, I think about Easter baskets, for the colors shriek spring.  I think about long-ago kits for dying eggs and the smell of vinegar.  I think about new lace-edged ankle socks for church.  I think about other times.

How is it possible for us to contain all we have known and encountered on this voyage?  What a miracle that we manage to sift and sort and store it for, we hope, retrieval as needed.  The wonder of the body remembering how it felt to crouch and bend while hunting the hidden eggs, the nests of jelly beans, the growing weight of the basket with each added find.  Do we imagine the memory because we know it happened or are we there once again?

I am a fan of boxes, bags, cabinets and drawers, places and means for the storage of goods.  To have and to hold and to carry.  I admire friends who have committed written works to memory, something for which I once had a talent.  The array of material, of subjects, for which our minds and bodies are repositories is without limit.  Every skill we've acquired, from a foreign language to knitting, remains stashed in some infrequently visited corner, possibly a diluted version of what it once was, but there even if as a more ghostly presence.

We are encyclopedic in ways we may not recognize.  Recipes, meals pleasurable or otherwise, conversations, places, scents, clothes that fit or didn't, a sibling's smile, fear or anticipation, every emotion, every sense, ideas, awarenesses, they fill us yet leave room for more.  To be is to contain.  Here's to spring and our capacity for the infinite.